Sakura Color SR-G 400

Konica was quietly the most ambitious high-speed color film maker of the late 1980s. The same company that introduced GX3200 in 1987, a year before Kodak shipped T-MAX P3200, ran SR-G 400 in the same family of consumer C-41 stocks starting in 1989. SR-G 400 was the everyday workhorse, sold next to SR-G 100 and 200 on Japanese department-store shelves with Sakura branding lingering on late boxes.

At box speed it was a competent ISO 400 negative, not a Portra but well above the noise floor for its category. Color leaned warm without going orange, with skin tones that printed flatter than Kodacolor Gold 400 of the same year and less green-cast than Fujicolor HG 400. Grain was visible at 8x10 enlargement, the standard print size of the era; today it scans with a 1990s texture some shooters chase.

Where it earned daily use was as the family-vacation, point-and-shoot, ambient-interior film for Japanese consumers through the early 1990s. Konica's Big Mini cameras and Hexar AF rangefinders moved through this stock by the truckload. The C-41 process was identical to Kodak and Fuji, so any drugstore lab could handle it.

Peer film for current reference is Kodak Gold 400, which runs warmer and slightly more saturated. Portra 400 wins on latitude by at least a stop in each direction. Fresh SR-G 400 would have landed roughly comparable to current Lomography 400, itself a Kodak-reformulated consumer stock.

Fresh stock does not exist. Konica Minolta exited photography in March 2006. Expired rolls turn up on eBay and at estate sales, mostly room-temperature storage, often shifted toward magenta with raised base fog. Freezer stock is rarer and worth the premium. Rate down a stop for every decade past expiration if you want anything printable.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.20. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A 10-second metered exposure becomes about 18 seconds at the negative. For ISO 400 in low light that threshold comes up fast, especially indoors at small apertures.